Hi Tim,
So, you ready for the HDSP challenge? ;-)
I've been fighting with mine for a good time now, so maybe I have a few words or other concerns to bring up here:
- I don't know the status of this firmware problem that Johannes T.
brings up. Supposedly, newer versions of the card's firmware aren't supported. I have an older card which I downgraded the firmware on anyway, but it might be good to ask on the ALSA list about this if you are buying a brand-spanking-new one.
- I couldn't get my PCMCIA bridge [laptop= ASUS L7 series] to work at
all with Mandrake or Red Hat. This means it is sketchy at best to use the cardbus interface [for me, with my hardware and these distros.] Debian and Gentoo work fine, however. Weird. What distro do you use?
- Right now, with ALSA 0.9.8 packages from Gentoo, I can only use the
HDSP+Alsa via Jack. Otherwise, I get errors about non-interleaved mode which I didn't get using older versions of Alsa under Debian, and which I don't get with new Alsa versions using the PCI card under Red Hat/Planet CCRMA. Go figure! But it performs quite well with Jack! Jack can handle the 8x2 analog channels, plus more if you feel like having lots of internal routing [i.e. virtual ports to record in Rezound or Ardour, FX sends + returns to Jack-Rack]. This is my favorite thing about Jack!
- Alsa has some nice utilities for the HDSP, such as hdspmixer or
hdspconf, and also tools you will NEED to run the card, such as hdsploader!
Tim Blechmann wrote:
i'm considering to buy a rme hammerfall dsp (cardbus + multiface) to use them with pd/linux...